Monday Briefing: The Quadramaran

The Shape Of Future Ships?

Williamsburg Man Says New Design Can Help U.s. Yards

NEWPORT NEWS — A high-tech, four-hulled ship might be the ticket to get American shipyards back into the commercial shipbuilding business, says a Williamsburg businessman who's pushing the design.

Trond Conradi, a Norwegian-born businessman based in Williamsburg, said his French partners have developed a design for a vessel that would be cheaper to build, more fuel efficient and much faster than the commercial ships of today, Conradi said.

The French company, Quadramaran International, spent four years working on the design. It uses four hulls similar to the two on a catamaran - thus the name quadramaran, he said.

However, unlike on a catamaran, the long hulls of the patented quadramaran design are close together, Conradi said. They trap a cushion of air that lifts the vessel partially out of the water as it accelerates, thus cutting down on surface drag and allowing for greater speed, he added.

"We're talking about 45 to 50 knots as a practical speed for a high speed vessel," Conradi said. That works out to about 50 to 60 miles an hour, much faster than anything now envisioned in the United States, he said.

Also, the design will not create a significant wake, permitting high speeds without interfering with other shipping, he said.

A very shallow draft will allow the vessel to land on beaches and in other shallow water areas. This, Conradi said, is extremely important because it will make ship loading and unloading possible in areas that don't have expensive port facilities. This, in turn, would create new demand for the ships, he said.

Those advantages of the new design, combined with burgeoning demand in the world shipping market as the existing fleet rapidly reaches obsolescence, promise a boom for shipbuilders positioned to take advantage of it, Conradi believes.

He said a conservative estimate would put the market for such a ship at $500 million over the next 10 years.

That amount is small compared, for example, with the $2 billion that Newport News Shipbuilding has been burning off its backlog of work in each recent year. But the figure is a substantial amount of money for smaller yards.

And, Conradi predicted, the market would grow from well below the $50 million a year average at first to well over that much later in the decade.

In his view, American builders now need only reach out and grasp the opportunity that lies before them.

Conradi, who lives in Williamsburg with his American wife and their children, said he has orders for three vessels of the new design and has been looking for a Hampton Roads shipyard to build them for foreign buyers at a price that would be competitive in the world market.

He said he has been negotiating with the Jonathan Corp. shipyard in Norfolk to build the three vessels, 80-foot passenger ferries which would cost just under $1 million each.

Those ferries would be small compared with five other ships Conradi said his company exepcts to have built in Norway.

Beating the prices of foreign yards should be easy because labor rates in U.S. yards are lower than those in Europe and about the same as in Japan, he said.

Americans need only exploit new technology and adjust to the rigors of the commercial marketplace, Conradi said.

Many in the U.S., including John Stocker, president of the Shipbuilders Council of America, a trade group of the nation's biggest yards, attribute Americans' apparent inability to compete with overseas builders to the subsidies that foreign governments provide shipyards in their countries.

But Americans have to un-learn some of the expensive habits they have picked up during years of lucrative, ever-expanding Navy work, Conradi said.

While acknowledging the existence of foreign subsidies, Conradi argues that shipbuilders here have been indirectly subsidized for years, both by the Jones Act - the U.S. law that prohibits foreign-built vessels from trade between American ports - and by huge Navy spending that excludes foreign builders.

He said his customers won't pay the $48 an hour American yards are accustomed to charging the Navy for U.S. labor. But there's still room for profit if the U.S. yards charge $24 for an hour for workers they are paying $16, he said.

Conradi said he and Quadramaran want to boost a U.S. market for their design and encourage American shipyards to learn how to build for that market, which is why they're negotiating with Jonathan Corp.

His choice of Hampton Roads was based in large part on the thriving shipbuilding industry already here, he said. All the facilities and most of the skills necessary for building ships of the quadramaran design are already present here, except perhaps aluminum welding, he said.

"We have people willing to buy these vessels and we have said, okay, lets take three of those vessels to the United States and jump-start the industry there," he said.